Graduation throws them back among the masses in the working world, but they stay in touch by letters and visits in spite of ongoing state harassment. Together, they walk, talk, read forbidden books, and ultimately are brought in for police interrogation and intimidation. Shaken, the narrator befriends a trio of male students, Georg, Edgar, and Kurt, discovering in them a questioning, restless spirit much like her own. But none of it helps: She eventually hangs herself. And she keeps a journal of surrealist observations to lift her spirits. She exchanges sex for food to supplement her pinched diet. She joins the Communist Party to gain some small status. Lola, a girl from the provinces, has adjusted to the awful poverty of student life. Sharing a college dorm room in the city with Lola and four other women, the narrator inhabits a Big Brotherlike world where loudspeakers blare proletarian music all day, where a longing for privacy is suspect, and personal belongings are regularly searched. Systematic oppression snuffs first the spirit, then the existence, of those few young Romanians brave enough to dare to think independently.

Young lives of quiet desperation under dictator Ceauescu are the poignant focus of Kleist Prizewinner MÅller's third novel but her first to be translated into English.

The land of green plums by herta muller